


if i were to die tomorrow

by misanthropist_bonbon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Ambiguous Slash, Ambiguous/Open Ending, M/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:33:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21933715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misanthropist_bonbon/pseuds/misanthropist_bonbon
Summary: Tom wishes to see Harry yet again in a different lifetime — and the first thing that Harry will recall is the warmth of Tom's hands closing his eyes. Tom trusts that one day, he will see Harry in one of the world's thousand cities, contained in one of the world's million rooms. Tom is certain that they will know each other, beneath the mask of a decade.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Tom Riddle, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle
Comments: 7
Kudos: 92
Collections: Chamber of Secrets' Winter Exchange (2019)





	if i were to die tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [asterismal (asterisms)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asterisms/gifts).

> happy holidays! :> they are not very much my strong suit so i apologise if it came out rather... ugly :< i enjoyed writing some parts of this! some are very hard to come up with. it is a bit ooc too, i think? tom is such a complex character to write. harry is more enjoyable though because he's a cute man. 
> 
> enjoy ur holidays and have a fun 2020 bro ♡

**if i were to die tomorrow**

❦

Perhaps it is divine will, for a man to be with another in his beginnings. They stand together, wearing the same skin, flesh belonging to him as much as it's another's.

It is the perfect insulator: withstanding heat and cold and time in an unnamed world. The skin is a glass shard reflecting the light rays caught. The bite of its brightness is balmy but fleeting—and they are now becoming—from one to halves, emerging in such a manner: splitting from the similar flesh, as gods would later incise molecules, divide continents, part seas, oblige stars to remain in an unreachable distance. They walk half-blind in newly formed limbs —palm in newfound hands. They coo without an alphabet and so they gave each other names.

With two syllables, distinguished through the muted light: _Harry_ — 

With him exists the vessel whom remember —_Tom_.

❦

Sometimes, Tom happens when Harry is at his happiest. Lumbers elude a watchful gaze and the dark shadow of trees cut figures through the water. It recreates a wonderful dream: the waves flow and ebb according to measure, mounting up ornaments along the shoreline—all brittle when humbled by his feet. Pass the brook, Harry swims, and the light scintillates through the leaves. The sky curves in on itself. 

Harry stands, with water rising to his stomach. His body glistens under the sheen of moonlight. Tom remembers grazing Harry's navel under the surface, then coming to know the sweetness and bitterness of his skin. He implores it like the taste of many apples: aromatic, crimson, and dappled yellow. Though Harry is a reminiscent of the inescapable one, with the worm squirming in its core.

"What shall I call you?" Feigned Tom, despite knowing all the man's intricacies inside and out.

The man, mid-thirties, owns the face of Harry. His hair mussed as he hastily began drying his head; the lifting of arms made his trim chest come in a rather noticeable light. Harry jerked his head downwards, not meeting Tom’s eyes.

"Harry," he coughs. "Harry Potter." He repeats in a sonorous voice.

Tom clenches the sand with his palms, letting go when the fragments dig deep. "If your name is Harry, then I must call you that." 

Harry's reply, a blinding smile, is etched onto rock hedges and sea shells afterwards. Tom is enchanted—that he swears he'd never allow the waves to sweep it like dust.

❦

Sheets rustle and the cocoon unravels a smaller form. Tom's hand skims Harry's morsel of flesh, ending above his rump. When Harry is in slumber, Tom deliberates more of their origin. If the Earth is a billion years old, suspended in the middle of a cosmic orbit, atoms splitting from the quark, to the clone, to the bomb, then the fall, where electrons spin ceaselessly to sustain the expanding universe, with the only instrument of light fading away in luminosity, then Tom and Harry are merely just sparks in the mind of a dying god. Then if Tom is not fire, why can't they both be eternal romancers meandering through the end of it all, the last figment of their illumination the product of a dying star? 

And time proves nothing. In a millennia that Tom had lived, he only learnt solitary. Yet this Harry had learnt joy. He is a man that knows of hunger, that knows of fullness, but never asked for more. He is a mere man without an intrepid blood —with a shallow name to be forgotten after a decade, but Tom cannot stop the tumultuous desire to come closer to him—as out of all primal sensations that pulses through in a calculated rush, the feeling that he's not close enough is predominant. 

(And they slept like chalk children inside the wooden house, for it to blaze into flames a day after. Harry had died in between Tom's arms — Tom burned holding his beloved.)

❦

Losing sight of Harry became a custom. The first and only Harry whose name and telltale bumps on skin he has not forgotten, told him: 

"My heart is on your palms, Tom." 

"If I were to die tomorrow or the day after this, I will always gravitate to you." Harry breathed out, "I will come — I will always come — in front of your doorway, in front of you! I will transcend through time and I will come back to you." 

"I will always come back to you." 

November air gusts through the tarry and the blanket of fog separated. The day continues to spin—and it spun mundane: spun even, as the grim, dull, sinister figure of a fruit-peeling knife.

"And I shall wait, my beloved." Tom murmured, embracing Harry's recoiling stature and they spoke no more.

The second time — they met in Florence. It was a balmy day and pressed that indeed, they were severed from each other. Harry married a woman and Tom had found a colleague in the ill-mannered man. They shared countless of trivial conversations, more than can be counted by fingers. All seems gradually empty as they revolve around the weather — how it comes and goes, but to Tom, it is enough. 

"I would like to show you Florence." Tom offered, sparing knowledge of what Italy came to be amidst the wreckage and rupture. 

"I just live around the block." Harry laughed. He accepted the offer, inching that Tom pays their food.

"Hold my hands, lest you lead astray." Tom spoke once more, laid his hand down for Harry to take. Tom doesn't need to wait long for his hand to be linked with another.

"Oh, don't fret," The edges of Harry's lips quirked up, "I'll come back to you anyway." 

The third time they met, Harry is a child. Not a mere—healthy child—but one born that cannot hear and speak. Tom acquaints himself that words in the beginning doesn't exist. They are unneeded.

❦

The fourth — current Harry — sought for words.

There are moments in time when rain is the only voice Harry chooses to hear. It is easier to succumb to forces greater than oneself, such as Tom's murmurs: vernal, humble, and soothing. Tom notices that his words are enough to alleviate Harry's inscrutable sinews. So, he speaks of the weather, of myths, of stories young and old, and Harry sinks to the protective layers of his accent. Tom sees that light fills Harry's eyes. Even the clear and sharp steel in his stare softens and it crumbles, like a rusty armour does. He gazes at Tom, blinks—lost and adrift—and suddenly, he is five again.

"How am I doing?" Harry forgets how to wonder.

Tom stops — a beat, testing foreign words on his tongue, "You are doing just fine, Harry." 

Harry wheezes which consumes higher amount of oxygen and he finds that breathing is a laborious task. "I must be doing very bad then, to hear you lie." 

There’s a charcoal-like whiff accentuating the air, of gunpowder mixed with gore and burned flesh. He can taste it in his mouth, the pungent and bitter taste of charred meat. It thrums in his bloodstream—a living inferno beneath his bones. Soon his lungs will shut down, followed by his kidneys, and Tom would have to watch it all happen. Harry smiles instead, with the barest hint of canines. Tom slowly descends, placing a chaste kiss on his forehead with a lack of better words. Harry's eyes shut almost instantly.

“You know I’ll come back to you, right?" Tears fall piece by piece, rust-red and salty as blood. 

"And I’ll wait for you, my beloved." Harry's silent sobs turns to heaves. Tom holds him together, weaving delicate bones; he anchors him down with arms strong and certain, clenched tight around his waist.

Tom recalls Harry's eyelashes fluttering down and holds a palm flat above his breastbone. He acquaints himself with its rise and fall. Tom refuses to weep, as he knows he would outlive Harry, as he would outlive them all. 

But a lone tear paves way in thrum of Harry's last heartbeat.

❦

Tom wishes to see Harry yet again in a different lifetime—and the first thing that Harry will recall is the warmth of Tom's hands closing his eyes. Tom trusts that one day, he will see Harry in one of the world's thousand cities, contained in one of the world's million rooms. Tom is certain that they will know each other, beneath the mask of a decade.

❦

Centuries roll by and Tom lives the world without Harry. He excelled in learning different media of art, eclipsed in scientific studies, and is now taking precedence in law and politics. He danced through millennia to millennia with the same skin, now with deadened nerves and shaved fine hairs. He is Nyx when jovial — Marvolo when whimsical — but will always be Tom to Harry and his lightning bolt insignia. 

Names hold no significance to him, yet he keeps Tom and Harry. These names are tightly sealed and they are still, waiting, and asleep.

❦

Harry's first day at work renders him skittish. It is not because of the unfamiliarity: Harry knows most of his associates, having interned two years before he graduated. They acknowledged his skull-thick determination and his unwavering drive. Harry acknowledged the fact that they are snobs. 

The dread settling in his bones, nestled just right in his trachea, makes breathing and speaking infinitely worse, is there due to the fact that this is not a joke anymore. He is no longer a student that can fail a test and repeat - no longer an intern to be taught of the right ways after committing a mistake - he is currently a full-fledged worker, earning big bucks. He is not just Harry Potter - he has a job. He is a legal receptionist of a grandiose law firm and despite its tacky appeal, for a man that is uncertain he’ll reach something in life, is certainly an accomplishment. 

A fresh grad in such a firm is unheard of—but Hermione had told him that reputable companies would never accept employees they believe has no potential. Perhaps Harry is reading through it hard? Still, no reassurances can calm his bones. He cleared his throat, fidgeting with his fingers. Thursdays are not particularly busy, he supposes. It is not noon yet but he had scheduled all his boss’ meetings, transcribed notes, and wrote emails that are deemed necessary by others. 

At one point, he debated playing on his computer or dining on snacks. He decided against it and slumped further on his chair. That is his steep: being an adult is tiring. He bit off a groan until a soft, foreign voice uplifts the office when the door opens. Harry is quick on his feet. It startles him as he had never heard of such a voice yet he recognizes it - as if he had heard it speak to him, talk to him. It leaves Harry terribly confused.

The man finally looks at Harry after ending his phone call. He gazes at him - with a magnifying intensity assessing him, and Harry fumbles with his words with flushed cheeks because the look feels mislaid. 

“Good morning, sir - by the way, I am -” 

“You’re the new legal receptionist, I am aware.” The man speaks, inching closer to Harry with only the desk separating them both. His eyes narrowed slightly with displeasure, “Harry Potter.” 

Harry thinks that the dulcet in the man’s voice definitely makes up for the barbs of his tongue. 

“Harry.” The man repeats, now with a softer tone and an unusual lilt in his voice. He stared right through Harry’s verdant eyes.

“I have been waiting patiently for your arrival.” The way the man says his words in a somnolent voice unfurls to him as if it meant differently; as if, when spoken out loud, it is directly about the passing time. When whispered, as if it meant to say that this is what he’d say to Harry when he longs to hear his voice and Harry responds with a name in his mouth— 

In him he carries a millennia of stifling loneliness—inside him, the pang of a lost god who has abandoned them — 

“Tom?”

  
  



End file.
